[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Some Advice for Distributists

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 15 2009)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


One of the pitfalls that lies in the path of those who try to gauge the
outlines of the future in advance, and swallows no small number of them,
is the assumption that today's popular beliefs and assumptions are a
good guide to tomorrow's. Sometimes, to be sure, this turns out to be
the case, and some widespread opinion or other remains glued in place
for decades or centuries - though this usually happens to opinions that
most sensible people think will soon be abandoned. More often, though,
there's no belief less popular at any given time than the most firmly
held convictions of the recent past.

A reminder of this landed in my inbox a few days back, in an article
about a recent survey of American opinion. According to the article,
only 53% of the people who responded to the survey agreed that
capitalism was better than socialism; twenty percent thought that
socialism was better, while 27% weren't sure which way to call it. The
article caused a brief flutter in the dovecotes of the Left, and a
somewhat larger one in the hawk-cotes of the Right, but I'm not at all
sure that either side caught the wider implications of the shift this
survey documented.

Some history needs to be surveyed to make sense of those implications.
Ever since the rubble stopped bouncing in 1945, what used to be called
political economy - that is, the way that human societies organize and
direct their economic activities - has been defined by a choice between
two unpromising alternatives. Calling them simply "capitalism" and
"socialism", popular as this habit is, misstates the matter, because
they were much more specific than that.

The first might better be called corporate capitalism, as it recycled
older forms of capitalism in the service of the weird social fiction of
the corporation, a "legal person" that has more rights and fewer
responsibilities than the rest of us, and serves today's well-to-do in
roughly the same role that the image of Oz the Great and Powerful did
for the little man behind the curtain. The second might with equal
justice be called bureaucratic socialism, as it translated the grand
promises and stirring rhetoric of generations of radicals into dour
totalitarian states that guaranteed every citizen an equal share of
deprivation and repression.

In retrospect, it might seem obvious that there are many other ways to
run a free market economy than relying on an arrangement that Adam Smith
himself considered the worst possible way to run a business. (I wonder
how many of today's cheerleaders for corporatist capitalism have read
Smith's scathing comments about joint-stock companies, the
proto-corporations of his own time.) It might seem equally obvious that
there are plenty of ways to manage an economy of collective ownership
that do not require vast sclerotic bureaucracies governed by dogmatic
ideologies. Nor are some form of free market or some form of collective
ownership the only ways to manage a society's production and
distribution of goods and services.

The fact remains, though, that since 1945 nearly everyone in the
industrial world, and most of the nonindustrial world as well, has
behaved as though corporate capitalism, bureaucratic socialism, or some
awkward hybrid such as social democracy composed of spare parts from
both, were the only possible forms of political economy. This is
problematic now, because both corporate capitalism and bureaucratic
socialism have not only failed abjectly to make good on their promises,
but have turned out to be catastrophically failure-prone into the bargain.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its client states, the massed
failures of bureaucratic socialism are hard to miss. Still, corporate
capitalism has demonstrated not once but twice that its results are just
as bad. From 1896 to 1929, and then again from 1980 to 2008, corporate
capitalism was allowed to take the bit in its teeth and run, and in each
case the result was an accelerating cycle of disastrous booms and busts
and the emergence of a culture of corporate kleptocracy that, between
them, ended up devastating the global economy. Meanwhile the faith that
a rising tide would lift all boats turned out, in both cases, to be
completely misplaced; the benefits that were supposed to trickle down
trickled up instead, beggaring the working classes and driving much of
the middle class into relative poverty while funneling most of society's
wealth into the unproductive hands of speculators and financiers.

Neither system, in other words, works worth a tinker's expletive at the
basic job of keeping an economy productive and functioning, and both
thus might reasonably be chucked into history's recycle bin. The one
difficulty is that very few people nowadays realize that there are other
alternatives - and this, in turn, is a function of our collective
blindness to our own history.

Until the Second World War, in point of fact, corporate capitalism and
bureaucratic socialism were only the most successful of a dizzying range
of systems of political economy that had a substantial public presence.
Distributism, syndicalism, synarchism, guild socialism, and many others
were discussed in a lively literature of books and periodicals, and each
had its enthusiastic followers. Nor were these simply slight variations
on the two systems left standing; some tended toward the free market end
of the spectrum, others toward the collective ownership end, and some
occupied positions in the middle, assigning some fields of economic
activity to the free market while putting others in the public sphere,
but each offered a distinctive system for managing the realities of
human economic life.

What squeezed these alternative systems out of collective consciousness
was the long era of the Cold War, when both sides turned their
respective systems of political economy into ideological battle flags in
the struggle over which of two empires - American or Russian - would
dominate the world in the wake of the British Empire's long retreat.
(Yes, I know it's unpopular these days to suggest that America is an
empire, but given that we station troops in 140 countries just now,
backing up a state of affairs in which the five percent of humanity that
lives in the United States uses around a third of the world's resources
and industrial output, the term is hard to avoid.) The United States won
that struggle, only to find - as every other empire in history has found
- that getting to the top of the heap simply makes you target number one
for an endless series of fresh challengers, one of whom will eventually win.

The disastrous narrowing of vision that was driven by the bitter
rivalries of the Cold War years remains fixed in place, though, not only
in the United States but - in large part due to America's current role
as the main manufacturer and exporter of the global culture industry -
throughout most of the world. The problem with this state of affairs is
not limited to the massive failures that afflict both corporate
capitalism and bureaucratic socialism; neither system has shown the
least trace of an ability to deal with the challenge of making human
economics work within the fragile ecology and finite resource base of
our planet, for example. Still, at a time when the world's industrial
societies are facing severe problems due to the steady depletion of
fossil fuel reserves, relying on systems of political economy that have
a proven track record of catastrophic dysfunction anyway is not exactly
a good idea.

What the survey mentioned at the beginning of this post shows, in turn,
is that a growing number of Americans have become aware of this last
point. That opens up options that have been closed for the last two
generations or so. Thus I'd like to offer a bit of advice to
distributists - yes, there are still some out there - and proponents of
any other alternative systems of political economy that may still be
around after all these years: now's your chance. If, as the survey
suggests, 27% of Americans have already reached the point where neither
capitalism nor socialism has any particular appeal, there's a large
audience waiting to hear what you have to say, if you make an effort to
get the word out to them.

Now of course there's also a place for newly minted alternatives,
provided that those don't start from the assumption that people can
consume more goods and services than they produce, or that the Earth's
remaining resource base can support - two little difficulties that have
been all too common in recent schemes of this sort. Even the most
determined prophet of some new system, though, might benefit from taking
a good close look at what has been done in the past; if you're going to
reinvent the wheel, it might be useful to make sure that your version is
actually better than the last century or two of attempts at the same
thing. Anything that can pop our collective imaginations out of the
current and hopelessly sterile fixation on the relative merits of two
abjectly failed systems is likely to be a good thing.

Will it be enough of a good thing to stave off the decline and fall this
blog has been discussing for the last three years? At this stage of the
game, with petroleum production already sliding and so many
opportunities gone by the boards, that seems hopelessly unlikely. Still,
the adoption of some less wildly inefficient and failure-prone approach
to political economy would be a very sensible move as we begin to deal
with the challenges of the long era of contraction and readjustment that
is taking shape around us right now. Utopian schemes remain as useless
as they have ever been, but efforts at thoughtful, constructive, and
realistic change are quite another matter, and in the wake of corporate
capitalism's latest round of failure, there might just be an opportunity
to accomplish a bit of the latter.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent: A User's
Guide to the End of the Industrial Age" (2008). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2009/04/some-advice-for-distributists.html


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